Overgrown and unkempt, the quarter-acre double lot in Venice was a shadow of its once-vibrant self. But the moment Gillian Wynn stepped through the gate and looked up at the swaying palms, she felt a powerful connection. “It was almost a custodial feeling,” she remembers. “I had to protect and preserve it.”

The cofounder of the environmental platform Planet Buyback, Gillian wasted no time putting in an offer. She dreamed of resurrecting the site, which was once owned by the celebrated landscape designer Jay Griffith.

She spent the next three months studying the property and thinking about how to replace two uninspired dwellings and a garage with a contemporary home that would be at one with the landscape. By the time she reached out to architect Tom Kundig, of Seattle- and New York–based Olson Kundig, her idea was fully formed.

“I’d started thinking about deconstructed geometry, and pavilions with specific functions: private living quarters, a wellness/yoga area, and space to entertain,” she explains. The trees, which she’d named for musicians like Elvis, Prince, Freddie Mercury, and David Bowie, were her guideposts.

Kundig, for his part, was delighted at the chance to “under-build” the site. “Gillian wanted a big garden with a little house, which I thought was kind of wonderful,” he says. “She didn’t want to see the garden lost to the development agenda in the neighborhood.”

Laid out as a series of indoor/outdoor spaces in a modified “U” shape, the house follows the general outline of the original buildings. “Our job was to work with Gillian’s program and unveil it in a way so that the garden becomes an even bigger part of living in the house,” notes Kundig. “Pavilions are perfect for that.”

The sunken living/dining room just beyond the entrance illustrates his point. Surrounded on three sides by garden views, it offers what the architect calls “a moment of peace within the larger urban-suburban setting.”

Sitting at the base of the “U,” the rectangular kitchen opens to a vista straight out of a Rousseau painting, just as Gillian had envisioned. Opposite the living/dining room is a wing containing the garage, a covered terrace, and Gillian’s yoga studio. The floor above holds the primary and guest bedrooms and a TV lounge.

The generously glazed stair tower to the bedroom wing marks more than a transition from the home’s public zone to the private areas. “The real idea is that you’re going up into the tree canopy—and as you come down the stair, you’re coming down into the ground cover,” Kundig says. “It’s completely intentional that the window corner essentially disappears into the garden.”

Thanks to landscape architect Russ Cletta, there’s plenty of vegetation to disappear into. He worked closely with Gillian to reinvigorate and reenvision the landscape that Griffith had designed decades before. And Cletta had unique insight into the property, having been Griffith’s apprentice and later business partner.

“Gillian wanted the garden to be part of the house,” says Cletta, who installed layered plantings for privacy and added a Japanese garden near the yoga studio. “People don’t always think that way.”

Since Gillian wanted to salvage as many of the original on-site trees as possible, Cletta proposed moving several, a job that necessitated bringing in cranes and careful excavation to avoid damaging the root systems. “We moved a lot of trees that other people would have cut down,” he says, pointing to the Dragon blood tree that Gillian nicknamed Sid Vicious and the Canary palm she calls Bob Marley.

Gillian, who served as co–general contractor with Tony Dudman of Habitat Construction, also oversaw the design of the interiors. She paired reclaimed ash floors with a textured Roman clay on the walls and held fast to her dream of installing bronze window and door frames. Her attention to detail and commitment to conservation extended to the choice of hemp insulation from Idaho-based Hempitecture.

Surveying the house, she says, “My favorite thing about it is its functionality. Everything is where it should be, and every room is scaled exactly right. I live here exactly the way I wanted to.”

Kundig couldn’t be happier. “If we’ve done our job, you’ll drive along the street and just see the trees and the hedge,” he says. “You don’t really see the house until you open the gate. And that’s perfect.”

More projects by Olson Kundig:

An Olson Kundig Tree House Peeks Over the Treetops in Costa Rica

A Seattle Inventor’s Home Does Double Duty as a Working Laboratory

Q&A: Tom Kundig on Why Buildings Should Move and Morph

Project Credits:

Architect: Tom Kundig, Olson Kundig / @olsonkundig

Landscape Architecture: Russ Cletta, Russ Cletta Design Studio / @russclettadesignstudio

Builder: Homeowner with Tony Dudman, Habitat Construction

Structural Engineer: Shawn Roberge, Lund Opsahl / @lundopsahl

Civil Engineer: Jorge Arreola, C.W. Howe Partners / @cwhowe_engineering

Lighting Design: Christopher Thompson, Studio Lux

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